Saturday, 8 August 2015

David Denby and Dante : Reader Response Criticism

In
1996 David Denby, the New Yorker writer, published an account of his return to
university, after thirty some years, to sit in on Literature seminars at
Columbia University. This sit-in was not a protest against the canon and all it
stood for, rather an older man’s attempt to observe, and maybe learn from, what
students in the early 1990s made of major writers found in said canon.
Reviewers at the time were divided over the worth of such a venture (Great Books
: My Adventure with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of
the Western World. Simon & Schuster, 1996) and we read the book now as
a snapshot of the American zeitgeist at the end of the Cold War.

Chapter
16 is where Denby and his fellow literature students tackle the first book of
the Dante’s Comedy. That the course doesn’t have time for the other two books
proves in itself to be a fault in what follows, as the students judge the
Florentine solely on what he creates in Inferno, without chancing what happens
next, namely Purgatorio and Paradiso. For some of us, Inferno is virtually
impossible to read meaningfully alone. A large part of its meaning hinges on
what Dante reveals in the last two books. Some would say Inferno is a dead end.

The
class didn’t go so far, going on to Boccaccio the following week. Boccaccio
would have had his own terse opinion about such an approach to Dante’s
masterpiece (it was Boccaccio, not Dante, who called the poem Divine, because
it ends with the sovereignty of the good) but be that as it may, the seminar
conversations recorded by Denby in his own book prompt further responses, some
of which are recorded in what follows.

The
first criticism levelled at Dante by these students is that he is a hater who
puts into Inferno people he wants to “get at”. He seems obsessed with the
people he places there and the tortures they endure. He even seems to get
pleasure from this, though Denby is unforthcoming with evidence for this from
the text itself. While we know Dante uses the stories of people he knew from
life and literature, how far we judge Dante’s choices as personal vendettas
will remain open to conjecture. While it amuses us that bad popes end up down
there, it is the sin itself that is the reason from them being there. The
students read the situation as being one of people tortured against their
wills, as one might do who reads the story outside of its purpose of the
possibility of hope. But those in Inferno choose to be there, this is the
result of free will. The people Dante selects for Inferno are the best examples
he can think of. Their transgression (lust, betrayal, anger) is an example to
us, the witnesses who read the poem, and a warning. If Inferno were no more
than Dante’s way of getting back at his enemies it would have enjoyed a short
life as a popular poem. He is showing us the consequences of sin without
repentance.

We
also have to keep in mind that Dante is repeatedly shocked by what he sees in
Inferno. It is cause of distress and disbelief to see many of these people in
such a place. He cannot credit it and has to be assured by Virgil, or the
characters themselves, that what he is seeing is for real. Dante’s reactions to
what he sees in Inferno are one of the important indicators of meaning in the
poem. Even at the literal level, where Dante the poet is read as Dante the lost
traveller (or later, pilgrim) in the Comedy, we have to concede that a simple
equation of hatred vindicated has limited traction in the Comedy. Dante’s main
concern is not the person but the sin. In Inferno he learns the hard way that
he can do nothing for those he may wish to be compassionate about. The moral
issues at stake in each circle of Inferno are Dante’s primary concern. It is
these that he presents to his readers not as a lecture in ethics but as a
series of retold stories for our own judgement.

Another
unusual claim made by David Denby is his view that, in his arrogance, “Dante
the poet made himself the hero of his trip to the underworld.” If Dante
is a hero in his own poem, what kind of hero are we talking about? That the
poem is egocentric in some ways may be admitted, it is certainly about the life
and world of this particular 14thcentury Florentine. But the Dante character spends most of his time
behind his guide Virgil, usually in a state of dread as to what might happen
next. He is not put forward as a hero in any medieval sense and as the poem
proceeds we develop a reliance on Dante and see things through his eyes, as how
else can we hope to understand anything that’s going on? Dante has little idea,
we have less. In fact, Denby’s view raises questions in our mind. Just exactly
how do we describe Dante? What is his role in the poem? Is he simply the
trusted authorial voice? Or do we follow his part as pilgrim later in the
Comedy as a form of conscience for how we should act in each circumstance put
in the way by the poet?

The
most revealing misconception in Denby’s essay comes when his teacher mentions
in passing “that the Romantics and the Victorians had disapproved of Dante
because they believed in mercy, not judgment.” This simplistic reduction not
only skews the picture of 19th century reception of Dante, it is a
misrepresentation of Dante himself. But to know why requires you to read
Purgatorio, where mercy gradually is introduced as the beginning of any way out
of the dead end of sin portrayed in Inferno. Indeed, only to read Inferno in
isolation from the other two cantiche is not only to miss the essential thought
of Dante, it is to miss a large part of the meaning of Inferno, a place
understood in retrospect better than by first encounter. It is for this reason
that Denby’s report of his Dante class becomes increasingly frustrating: the
students read Inferno as a document of terror and violence, unmediated either
by Dante’s art, or the rest of the Comedy. One wishes they had started at the
centre of Purgatorio, where Dante explains how everything lives according to
its self-awareness of innate good.